The Psychology Behind The “HEAL” Method and How It Helps You Become Happier

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Human emotions are complex, but we’re often guilty of oversimplifying them. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a well-meaning but misguided “Don’t worry, be happy” or “Try not to worry”, you’ll understand.

Because when we talk and think about happiness as a general outlook, we tend to sort people into two camps: “glass half full” and “glass half empty”. For a long time, even psychologists have considered personalities as one or the other, but as new research has found, this may not be the case.

According to University of California Berkeley researchers, it’s actually possible to actually learn new ways to activate your feelings of engagement in a positive experience. Put simply: it’s technically possible to teach yourself to be happier.

According to the researchers, people’s ability to get the most out of positive experiences can indeed be strengthened through training. This means learning to savour positive experiences in order to experience them in a heightened way.

As Psychology Today explains, the idea behind the model is that by learning to engage in a positive experience, you develop a greater sense of resilience and self-worth. “These feelings help to create an “upward spiral” in which good times build on themselves, further enhancing your happiness,” it explains.

“Even when ‘external supports and familiar activities are less available’, such as those restrictions in effect during the Covid-19 pandemic, you ‘are left internally with whatever psychological resources’ you’ve managed to acquire.”

Good news indeed for anyone currently self-isolating or dealing with the continued uncertainty of the Omicron variant.

How the HEAL Model Works

There are four distinct steps.

1. Have the enjoyable experience.

This can be done physically, by doing it, or mentally, by conjuring it up, such as thinking about someone who cares about you.

2. Enrich the experience through these sub-steps

Then, the research suggests, the key is to enrich the experience by making it as long-lasting as possible, and keeping it active in your consciousness.

“Focus on multiple aspects of the experience, including its meaning, your perceptions and sensations, the way it feels and taking action. Increase the novelty of the experience so that it sticks out more in your mind and heighten the personal relevance of the experience by delving into your feelings about it.”

Then, the experience can be intensified through “up-regulating” your emotions, or reliving the parts that feel good.

3. Absorb the experience

This involves making a deliberate effort to internalize it so that it feels like a part of you.

“Turn attention inward to your emotional state and highlight the reward value of the experience.” For example, after a night out with friends, spend some time reflecting on how socializing made you feel, what particular parts you enjoyed and what you gained from the experience.

4. Link positive and negative material

Of course, there are plenty of experiences in our lives that we might struggle to attach positive meaning to, from a parking ticket to experiencing grief and loss.

“Focus on something positive even while you’re aware of negative material in the background,” suggest the researchers. “For example, become more involved in the film you’re watching while still noticing that your dread of the coming work day continues to persist. The positive should ultimately drown out the negative in this step.”

How to Become Happier In Your Own Life

It goes without saying that no research, this included, is a magic bullet to improving wellbeing, tackling depression and helping balance our emotions in such difficult times. But it does offer the possibility of being able to learn new ways of experiencing the good times in your life.

“Fulfilment may not come naturally to you, but by letting the enjoyable experiences change you at a deeper level, those good times can become both more frequent and more long-lasting,” Psychology Today explains.

So whether you’re gearing up for New Year’s Eve celebrations, practising some much-needed self-care or planning some time off from the chaos of the world, maybe one thing we can all resolve to do is to stop and smell the roses from time to time?

By: Amy Beecham, Stylist

Source: The Psychology Behind the “HEAL” Method and How It Helps You Become Happier

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What Makes People Happy? Harvard Study Says Money Isn’t Most Important Factor

It’s hard to get proof on what makes people happy but there is a longitudinal survey that has been examining happiness since the 1930s and after decades of research, the results have been published in a new book, The Good Life.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, led by professors Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, has studied the same 700 people and their families over time to determine what makes people thrive. They asked thousands of qualitative questions as well as taking hundreds of quantitative health measurements from brain scans to blood work.

In the 1930s, participants were chosen from either Harvard’s male students or a group of boys from a low-income suburb of Boston. Every five years, they gave medical information and every two years, they answered detailed questions. Their wives and children later joined the study, that has tracked this group through work, marriage, divorce and even death—25 participants left their brains to the study after they died. Waldinger is the fourth director of the project over its lifetime.

He says, “we learnt that people believe happiness is something they can achieve—if they buy that house or get a promotion or lose enough weight, then happiness will follow. We act as if it is a destination we will get to if we tick the right boxes, but the data very clearly shows that this is simply not true. And that’s a good thing, as contentment is no longer something out of reach, but eminently achievable for all of us.”

It turns out that money does not make people happy, nor does your station or rank. It is mostly relationships and the connections you forge that leads to the most contented people. Whether these are in the form of friendships, book clubs, romantic attachments, church groups, sports partners or co-workers, the people with the strongest social bonds and connections in their 50s, were in the best shape in their 80s.

Source: What Makes People Happy? Harvard Study Says Money Isn’t Most Important Factor

.

Related contents:

Happiness”. Wolfram Alpha. Archived from the original on 18 July 2011. Retrieved 24 February 2011.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that “An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on what various writers are talking about.”

Two Philosophical Problems in the Study of Happiness”. Archived from the original on 14 October 2018. Retrieved 13 October 2018.Veenhoven, R.

Does Happiness Differ Across Cultures?” (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 August 2017. Retrieved 10 October 2018.Wolff-Mann, Ethan (13 October 2015).

What the New Nobel Prize Winner Has to Say About Money and Happiness”. Money.com.

Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Philosophy”. stanford.edu. Archived from the original on 12 January 2012. Retrieved 10 August 2015.

Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions”. In Lewis, Michael; Haviland-Jones, Jeannette M. (eds.).

Self-Conscious emotions”. In Barrett, Lisa Feldman; Lewis, Michael; Haviland-Jones, Jeannette M. (eds.).

Can happiness be taught?”.ashington Post (17 April 2017). “All you need is love – and funding: 79-year-old Harvard study of human happiness may lose grant money

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Want To Live a Happy Life? Focus on Your Relationships

Credit: Roberto Nickson / Unsplash

Harvard psychiatrist Robert Waldinger discusses how 80 years of ongoing research show relationships to be vital for health and happiness.

How can you live a happy life? It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer because there are so many factors to account for. Is a happy life built on your career and earnings? Your standing within your community? Does it come from a photo album filled with memories of holidays and vacations? Is it predicated on your health and wellness or based on a genetic predisposition toward being happiness regardless of the circumstances?

In some ways, the answer is yes to all of these, as each contributes to how you approach life and your appraisal of it. You can’t ignore any one, nor do any offer a universal panacea for the others.

However, in their new book The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, the director and associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development respectively, argue there is one factor that “stands out for its power and consistency” in helping people live thriving and fulfilling lives. That is the quality of their relationships.

I spoke with Dr. Waldinger to learn why relationships had such power and how we could better cultivate them in our lives.*

Kevin: For those who may be unfamiliar, what is the Harvard Study of Adult Development?

Waldinger: As far as we know, it is the longest study of adult life that’s ever been done. We started the study in 1938 — so I’m the fourth director [Laughs] — and we are collecting data to this day. It has followed the same people for 85 years and has also started following their children, so we now have 724 families.

What’s rare about this study is that it follows people year after year over decades, so we get to see how life really progresses for people rather than just taking snapshots of life at different points.

Kevin: What are the study’s aims?

Waldinger: The aim is to see what helped people thrive as they went through their lives.

This was radical for its time because most research back then looked at what went wrong in human development because they wanted to know how to make things better. But there had never really been a study of what promotes well-being and what predicts who will be healthier and happier as they go through life.

Kevin: Before discussing what makes a good life, let’s first consider some popular misconceptions. What does the research show that we get wrong about happiness and well-being?

Waldinger: There are all these myths in the culture, right? That if you’re rich, you’re happier. That if you’re famous, you’re happier. That if you achieve a lot, you’ll be happier. And none of those is true.

We’ve had rich people, famous people, and high-achieving people in our study, and they’re not happier on average than the people who lead regular lives. The problem, I think, is that our culture holds out these myths because they sell things.

Think of all the messages we get about how we’ll be happier if we buy a certain car, right? Or we’ll always look young if we use a certain brand of face cream. This idea is that we can make everything perfect if we just consume the right things.

And although we all know rationally that’s not true, we can get the feeling that somehow other people have it all figured out, and we don’t.

Kevin: It’s interesting that we listen so much to other people about what will make us happy. You’d think we would know ourselves well enough to accurately predict our future happiness. And yet, speaking for myself here, the success rate has not always been great.

Why do we have such difficulty forecasting what will and won’t make us happy?…

Continue Reading…

By: Kevin Dickinson

Source: Want to live a happy life? Focus on your relationships – Big Think

.

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How To Bring More Gratitude Into Your Life and Improve Your Mental Health

How do you go about cultivating more gratitude? (Picture: Getty/Metro.co.uk)

This isn’t to say gratitude is a bad thing – far from it. But when wielded as a weapon, it gets a bad rap.Gratitude, viewed properly, as being thankful for the good things in your life, can be a powerful thing. There’s a wealth of research that points to gratitude – feeling it and expressing it – making us happier and boosting mental well being.

The key is not to ignore issues by sticking gratitude on top as a plaster, but incorporating gratitude more seamlessly into your day-to-day life. It’s about recognizing that things aren’t perfect, but there’s some stuff that’s worth appreciating.

‘Gratitude works to improve our mental health,’ says Counseling Directory member Kirsty Taylor. ‘It’s a really powerful emotion. ‘Gratitude is strongly associated with emotions such as optimism, greater life satisfaction and enjoyment of the moment, an improved ability to handle a crisis situation, increased self esteem, better resilience and increased physical and mental wellbeing.

‘Gratitude, simply, allows us to appreciate situations, people and every day things in a way that increases our happiness and allows us to take grater pleasure in all aspects of life.’Bringing an attitude of gratitude into your life isn’t as easy as just telling yourself to buck up and be grateful, of course.

It’s a conscious practice, a change to your way of thinking. So, how do you bring more thankfulness into your being?

Make a conscious decision to be grateful

Changing the way you think, feel, and behave isn’t going to happen magically, with no effort on your end. Sorry. ‘It can be hard to cultivate gratitude when the daily grind of life makes it hard for us to do so,’ Kirsty tells Metro.co.uk. ‘People can have stressful environments, jobs, families and life situations that make it especially hard to feel grateful for our lives and our circumstances.

‘However, if we don’t make a place for gratitude in our life, it can be a much darker world that we live in. ‘Gratitude is often a chosen state of mind or being and can be increased by making a conscious decision to try and focus on happiness.’

Practice gratitude in the mornings and evenings

Here’s an easy way to start getting into the grateful mindset. Each morning, before you get out of bed (and perhaps instead of doing your usual doomscrolling) challenge yourself to think of three things you’re grateful for – and spend a moment appreciating how great that thing is.

It’s okay if it’s something that seems teeny-tiny or silly, like ‘I’m grateful that I’m going to get myself a nice hot drink on the way to work’. Make sure you don’t just rattle through your list and get on with your day. Take time to really dwell on your gratitude for these things, and feel it.

You can do the same thing right before bed. Dominique Antiglio, a sophrologist at BeSophro, suggests combining this practice with a spot of meditation and physical relaxation. She recommends: ‘First thing in the morning, stand up, gently shake your entire body, letting go of any tension. Exhale fully all negative anticipation and anxieties you may feel.

‘Then sit down, inhale, tense your body, exhale and relax each part of your body from head to toe. Then in a relaxed state with eyes closed, think about one thing that you are grateful for now or that you are going to experience today. ‘It can be a simple as how comfortable your pyjamas feel in that moment (start simple!) and it will become deeper and more meaningful as you repeat this practice.

‘Last thing in the evening, shake the tension of the day away by moving and breathing, and then close your eyes. Think about one quality or resource that got you through your day i.e. perseverance, connection with a friend, hope, calm etc. ‘Then spend a moment gently activating this word in your body and mind through gentle in-breaths and out-breaths.’

Start a gratitude journal

Instead of only thinking or saying those things you’re grateful for, try writing them down. ‘One of my anxiety clients, I asked to keep a gratitude journal, and every time she felt negative or anxious to revert to writing all the things she felt grateful for at that moment,’ says life coach Denise Bosque. ‘It really helped, because it’s training the brain towards noticing and feeling the positive stuff that is all around us in abundance.’

Open your mind to little things

A key part of cultivating gratitude is learning to actually notice the good stuff and savour it. Once you know you’ll have to think of three things to be grateful for at the end of the day, you might find yourself naturally looking out for positive bits in life.

Keep your eyes and mind open to take in the parts of your day that you might normally overlook: how nice it is to walk past the park on the way to work, how tasty your lunch is, how you’re actually really enjoying a new hobby you’ve been trying.

‘Even when it feel tricky to find something to be grateful for, the simple fact that you are starting to look for it is like opening a door to a new world and perspective,’ Dominique explains. ‘When we feel grateful, we are naturally opening up our minds and body, calming our nervous system and shifting our perspective to something more constructive. We are learning to contemplate ourselves, our lives or people around us from a positive place.’

Reframe challenges

Okay, this is where it gets a little trickier. When you come up against bad times, it’s fine to feel sad, angry, or scared. But can you also take a moment to reframe some small part of what’s happened with gratitude?

‘It can be useful to think of a positive way of reframing each complaint that we might want to make,’ says Kirsty. ‘If someone is rude to you at work, you might want to complain to a friend about them. Instead, you could remind yourself of all the other great colleagues you are fortunate to work with and be grateful that perhaps you aren’t having the same stressful day as a rude colleague.

‘When difficult things happen in life, such as loss and bereavement and relationship breakups, we all can have a tendency to feel very down and depressed and low in mood about such painful life events.

‘It can be very hard to reach for a positive when things feel very difficult, but those who can practise daily gratitude might be able to find a positive in even the darkest situations.

‘Loss reminds us to love those around us, relationship breakups show us that love feels wonderful when it’s going well, and that we can learn something so our next relationship will be different. Bereavement can make us stronger in the long term, can remind us of the precious nature of life and allow us to breathe in our surroundings each and feel grateful for the life we get to live.’

Express gratitude out loud

Don’t just think grateful thoughts – speak them. Comment on how lovely the weather is today, say out loud that you appreciate your body for getting you where you need to go, talk about positive things in your life to balance out any venting.

Tell people you appreciate them

Why keep all that gratitude to yourself? If you’re thankful for someone’s support, their actions, their presence, tell them. This can be as small as giving someone a genuine thank you for making you a tea, it can be telling your partner how much you appreciate them, it could be writing your parents a letter to say how grateful you are for all they’ve done.

Stick some visual reminders around your house

Again, it’s all about retraining your brain to notice the good. If you find the adjustment difficult, it can help to add some visual reminders around your living space.

Dominique suggests: ‘Stick post-its around the house, for example in a room or cupboard you open often throughout the day, put a smiley on it and let that be a trigger to find something, at that moment, to be grateful for.’

Do a random act of kindness

Gratitude begets gratitude. Once you’re feeling it, you can spread it around like wildfire. Try doing a random act of kindness. Pay for the coffee of the person behind you in the queue, get some flowers for your neighbour, give your friend a call. You’ll inspire gratitude in them, and also feel that glow of doing something good.

By:

Source: How to bring more gratitude into your life and improve your mental health | Metro News

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Related contents:

Definition of Gratitude – Oxford Dictionary, archived from the original on 24 September 2016

“The 5 Founding Fathers and A History of Positive Psychology”. PositivePsychology.com. 12 February 2015. Retrieved 3 July 2021.Wood, A. M.; Maltby, J.; Stewart, N.; Linley, P. A.; Joseph, S. (2008).

“A social-cognitive model of trait and state levels of gratitude” (PDF). Emotion.  (2): 281–290. doi:10.1037/1528-3542.8.2.281. PMID 18410201.McCullough, M. E.; Tsang, J.; Emmons, R. A. (2004).

Gratitude in intermediate affective terrain: Links of grateful moods to individual differences and daily emotional experience” (PDF). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 86 (2): 295–309.

“Thanks but No Thanks? Gratitude and Indebtedness Within Intergenerational Relations After Immigration”. Family Relations. 69 (1): 63–75. doi:10.1111/fare.12401. hdl:10138/322006. ISSN 1741-3729. S2CID 210539269.Emmons, Robert A.; Michael E. McCullough.

Highlights from the Research Project of Gratitude and Thankfulness”. Archived om the original on 11 August 2010. Retrieved 27 August 2010.Calvin, Jean (1845). “Commentary on the Psalms. 1845-49”. Calvin Translation Society: 70.

“Gratitude – Parent of all virtues”. The Psychologist. 20 (1): 18–21. Retrieved 12 March 2022.ALEX WOOD, STEPHEN JOSEPH and ALEX LINLEY (2007). “Gratitude – Parent of all virtues”. 20 (1): 18–21. Retrieved 12 March 2022.

Conceptualizing gratitude and appreciation as a unitary personality trait. Archived 28 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine Personality and Individual Differences, 44, 619-630.Sheldon, Kashdan, Steger.

Designing Positive Psychology: Taking Stock and Moving Forward. p. 249.Wood, A. M., Joseph, S., & Maltby, J. (2008). PersonalPages.Manchester.ac.uk Archived Wood, A. M., Joseph, S. & Maltby (2009).

Gratitude predicts psychological well-being above the Big Five facets. Archived 28 September 2011 at the Wayback Machine Personality and Individual Differences, 45, 655-660.

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Why Indecision Makes You Smarter

Indecision can seem like a wholly undesirable trait. But research shows it might actually lead to smarter judgements. In the TV series The Good Place, the character Chidi Anagonye is defined by his inability to make even the simplest of decisions – from choosing what to eat, to proclaiming love for his soulmate. The very idea of making a choice often results in a serious stomach-ache. He is stuck in continued ‘analysis paralysis’.

We meet Chidi in the afterlife, and learn that his indecisiveness was the cause of his death. While standing in the street, endlessly equivocating on which bar to visit with his best friend, an air-conditioning unit from the apartment above falls on his head, killing him instantly.

“You know the sound that a fork makes in the garbage disposal? That’s the sound my brain makes all the time,” he says in one episode. And besides making himself unhappy, Chidi’s lack of confidence in his own judgements drives the people around him crazy.

If that sounds like an exaggerated version of you, then you are not alone: indecisiveness is a common trait. While some people come to very quick judgements, others struggle to weigh up the options – and may even try to avoid making a choice at all.

As Chidi shows, indecisiveness can be linked to problems like anxiety, yet recent research suggests that it can also have an upside – it protects us from common cognitive errors like confirmation bias, so that when the person does finally come to a judgement, it is generally wiser than those who jumped to a conclusion too quickly. The trick is to learn when to wait, and when to break through the inertia while it’s holding you back.

The enemy of good

Psychologists have various tools to measure indecisiveness. One of the most common questionnaires – the Frost Indecisiveness Scale – asks participants to rate a series of statements on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). They include:

  • I try to put off making decisions
  • I have a hard time planning my free time
  • I often worry about making the wrong choice
  • It seems that deciding on the most trivial thing takes me a long time

Using this scale, psychologists have shown that indecisiveness is often a product of perfectionism. Perfectionists are scared of the shame or regret that may come with making the wrong choice – and so they put off making decisions until they feel certain they are doing the right thing. (And in some cases, of course, they simply never reach that level of confidence.)

The frustration this brings can be a barrier to happiness; in general, the higher someone scores on the scale above, the lower they will score on measures of life satisfaction, according to a study by Eric Rassin, a professor of psychology at Erasmus University, in the Netherlands. They are less likely to endorse statements such as “the conditions of my life are excellent”, for example, or “if I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing”.

Jumping to conclusions 

From these results, indecisiveness would seem like a wholly undesirable trait. Recent research, however, suggests that the struggle to come to a quick conclusion – as uncomfortable as it may be – can also have an upside, since it protects people from some important cognitive biases. 

Evidence for these benefits comes from a recent paper by Jana-Maria Hohnsbehn, a doctoral researcher, and Iris Schneider, a professor of social psychology, at the TU Dresden (Technische Universität Dresden).

Rather than using the Frost Indecisiveness Scale, Hohnsbehn and Schneider focused on a measure of “trait ambivalence”, which looks more specifically at the thoughts and feelings underlying someone’s judgement and decision-making (or lack thereof). For example, people are asked to rate statements such as:

  • My thoughts are often contradictory
  • I often feel torn between two sides of an issue
  • Sometimes when I think about a topic, it almost feels like I am physically switching from side to side

“If these statements resonate with us, then we are probably high in trait ambivalence,” says Hohnsbehn.

As you might expect, those high in trait ambivalence take a longer time to make decisions. But Hohnsbehn and Schneider found that they are also less prone to bias when coming to their judgements.

For example, in one experiment, she asked her participants to read a series of scenarios, such as:

You meet a person, and you would like to find out whether he/she is an introvert or extrovert. You guess that the person is an extrovert. Which of the following two questions would you ask?

  • Do you like spending time at home alone?
  • Do you like going to parties?

Many people pick the second question, but this is a sign of confirmation bias – you are only looking for the information that agrees with your assumption, rather than looking for evidence that you may be wrong. Hohnsbehn and her colleagues found that people with high trait ambivalence were less likely to do this. Instead, they chose to interrogate their assumption, in order to make sure they had the information they needed to come to a correct answer.

For another experiment, the participants read about an employee, Mr Müller, who was seeking to get his contract renewed. After making a preliminary decision about whether to allow Mr Müller to continue in the role, the participants were given some additional statements, which were ostensibly from industry experts about Mr Müller. Some of these statements agreed with the participants’ initial decisions, while others disagreed.

The participants’ task was to rate the credibility and importance of each one. Hohnsbehn and Schneider found that the people scoring high on ambivalence tended to be more open-minded to the statements that disagreed with their initial point of view, and rated them more highly for their credibility and importance – whereas those who showed little trait ambivalence were more likely to discount them.

These findings are important, since confirmation bias is one of our most common cognitive errors, preventing us from analysing evidence rationally in everything from our personal relationships to our political views. Trait ambivalence helps protect us from this kind of oversimplistic thinking – and may also help us with other forms, too.

Studies by Schneider, for instance, suggest that people with high trait ambivalence are also less prone to “correspondence bias”, which is a tendency to ignore the context of someone’s behaviour and to instead attribute any failures and successes directly to the person themselves. To give a straightforward example: if someone slips over, correspondence bias might lead us to conclude that they are inherently clumsy (an internal factor), rather than recognising the slipperiness of the floor (an external factor).

Correspondence bias might also lead us to assume that someone struggling in their education simply lacks intelligence, rather than considering the strains of their financial difficulties or their responsibilities within the family. People with high trait ambivalence are more likely to recognise those other factors than people who form quick and confident judgements.

Action over inaction 

Hohnsbehn’s research should be good news if you’ve ever felt impatient with your inability to come to a quick decision. “The general experience of being ambivalent needs to be embraced,” she suggests. “It can give us necessary pause, signalling to us that things are complex and that we need more time to engage in more careful thought about our decision.”

It is only when this becomes excessive that we face problems. “As with most things, there is a balance that needs to be struck,” adds Hohnsbehn. That might explain why indecisive people often score lower on those measures of life satisfaction – their ambivalence, when facing important choices, has become overwhelming.

One simple step might be to set a time limit for your final decision so that you do not spend too much time ruminating on the different options without actually gaining any new insights. Depending on the type of problem you are facing, Hohnsbehn suggests you might even consider turning it into a series of tasks – such as devoting two hours to the search for new information, for example, before spending a certain amount of time deliberating.

If you still feel paralysed, you might find inspiration in a study by Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, which examined people’s overall happiness after making important life changes.

Levitt, who is a co-author of the book Freakonomics, set up a website where people described various dilemmas they were facing in their lives – from getting a tattoo to moving house, returning to education or quitting their jobs. The participants were then asked to flip a coin, the outcome of which would tell them whether or not to make the change. 

Following up with the participants over the following months, Levitt found many people had taken the plunge; if the coin toss had told them to take action, they were more likely to make the life change. And they reported being significantly happier than those who had simply carried on as before (regardless of whether the coin had told them to or not), without quitting, moving or getting that tattoo.

We can guess that, before the study, most of these participants had already been thinking carefully about the situation at hand, but their worries about making the wrong choice had prevented them from taking the plunge. The coin had simply acted as a small nudge to finally overcome their ambivalence.

The moral of the study, then, is not that we should make all decisions on the whim of a tossed coin. It is that breaking through your hesitancy and doubt will leave you happier than you might imagine. “A good rule of thumb in decision making is, whenever you cannot decide what you should do, choose the action that represents a change, rather than continuing the status quo,” concluded Levitt.

Like Chidi in The Good Place, we can weigh up all the pros and cons of every situation – and that ambivalence will help us to make wiser choices. Once that ambivalent thinking has served its purpose, however, you must learn to cast it aside – safe in the knowledge that any decision is often better than making no choice at all.

By David Robson

David Robson is a science writer and author of The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life, published by Canongate (UK) and Henry Holt (USA) in early 2022. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.

Source: Why indecision makes you smarter – BBC Worklife

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Related contents:

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). DSM 5 diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. In DSM 5 Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders.

Appel, H., Englich, B., & Burghardt, J. (2021). “I Know What I Like”–Indecisiveness Is Unrelated to Behavioral Indicators of Evaluation Difficulties. Frontiers in psychology, 4042.

irn, R. M., Roeber, B. J., & Pollak, S. D. (2017). Early childhood stress exposure, reward pathways, and adult decision making. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(51), 13549-13554.

Cavedini, P., Gorini, A., & Bellodi, L. (2006). Understanding obsessive–compulsive disorder: focus on decision making. Neuropsychology review, 16(1), 3-15.

Ferrari, J. R., & Olivette, M. J. (1993). Perceptions of parental control and the development of indecision among late adolescent females. Adolescence, 28(112), 963-970.

Hartley, C. A., & Phelps, E. A. (2012). Anxiety and decision-making. Biological psychiatry, 72(2), 113–118.Kaur, R., & Singh, S. (2019).

A Study Of Relationship Between Career Decision Making And Parenting Style Among Adolescents. Editorial Board, 8(12), 61.Lauderdale, S. A., Martin, K. J., & Moore, J. (2019).

Aversive indecisiveness predicts risks for and symptoms of anxiety and depression over avoidant indecisiveness. Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, 37(1), 62-83.Leykin, Y., Roberts, C. S., & DeRubeis, R. J. (2011).

Decision-making and depressive symptomatology. Cognitive therapy and research, 35(4), 333-341.Murphy FC, Rubinsztein JS, Michael A, Rogers RD, Robbins TW, Paykel ES, et al. (2001).

Decision-making cognition in mania and depression. Psychological Medicine. 31:679–693.Nielen, M. M. A., Veltman, D. J., De Jong, R., Mulder, G., & Den Boer, J. A. (2002).

Decision making performance in obsessive compulsive disorder. Journal of Affective Disorders, 69(1-3), 257-260.Pushkarskaya, H., Tolin, D., Ruderman, L., Kirshenbaum, A., Kelly, J. M., Pittenger, C., & Levy, I. (2015).

Decision-making under uncertainty in obsessive–compulsive disorder. Journal of psychiatric research, 69, 166-173.Yates, J. F., Ji, L. J., Oka, T., Lee, J. W., Shinotsuka, H., & Sieck, W. R. (2010).

Indecisiveness and culture: Incidence, values, and thoroughness. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 41(3), 428-444.

Overthinking: Definition, Causes, & How to Stop

Self-Doubt: Definition, Causes, & How to Overcome It

Acceptance: Definition, Theory, & Tips

Negativity: Definition, Bias, & Tips to Stop It

19 Ways To Be Your Authentic Self

Mindlessness: Definition, Theory & Examples

​Ambivalence: Definition, Examples, & Tips​​

How to Make Better Decisions: 14 Smart Tactics for Curbing Your Biases, Managing Your Emotions, And Making Fearless Decisions in Every Area of Your Life!

Overcoming Anticipatory Anxiety: A CBT Guide for Moving past Chronic Indecisiveness, Avoidance, and Catastrophic Thinking

​Overcoming Indecisiveness: The Eight Stages of Effective Descision-Making

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